Rawh ibn Zinba al-Judhami

Abū Zurʿa Rawḥ ibn Zinbāʿ al-Judhāmī (died 703) was the Umayyad governor of Palestine, one of the main advisers of Caliph Abd al-Malik and the chieftain of the Judham tribe.

Life Origins Rawh was the son of Zinba ibn Rawh ibn Salama, a noble of the Judham, an Arab tribe that had been concentrated in Palestine before the Muslim conquest in the 630s. During this period, Zinba supervised a trading post for merchants crossing Palestine for the Byzantine Empire or its Ghassanid clients. Before the advent of Islam in the 620s–630s, a caravan of Qurayshi merchants from Mecca, including Umar ibn al-Khattab, attempted to cross through Zinba's post hiding gold in the stomach of one of their camels. Zinba suspected this, slaughtered the camel, confiscated part of the gold and insulted Umar, to which the latter threatened retaliation. According to this anecdote, traced back to Muhammad ibn al-Sa'ib al-Kalbi (d. 763), Zinba was operating under the authority of the Ghassanid phylarch al-Harith ibn Abi Shamir.

Rawh's brother Salama participated in a war council at the Beersheba estate of Amr ibn al-As. However, Rawh emerged as the most influential member of his family and became a rival of the Judham's preeminent chieftain, the elder Natil ibn Qays. The latter belonged to the Banu Sa'd clan of the tribe, while Rawh belonged to the Banu Wa'il clan, both of whose progenitors were sons of the Judhamite chief Malik ibn Zaydmanat ibn Afsa.

Service under the Umayyads Rawh first appears in the historical record in 657 during the Battle of Siffin, where he was the commander of a contingent of Judham tribesmen from Jund Filastin (military district of Palestine) in the army of the governor of Syria, Mu'awiya I, against the forces of Caliph Ali . He was also the flag bearer for the Judham as a whole, an honor typically reserved for the most distinguished nobleman of an Arab tribe. At an unknown point after Mu’awiya became caliph in 661, he may have appointed Rawh governor of Baalbek. They were unsuccessful and Rawh was again dispatched in 682–683 as a commander in Muslim ibn Uqba's army, which was sent to suppress the Hejaz rebellion. This effort was opposed by Natil.

In the summit of pro-Umayyad tribes at Jabiyah hosted by Ibn Bahdal in 684, Rawh is credited with delivering a speech favoring Marwan ibn al-Hakam to assume the caliphate rather than other Umayyad candidates such as Khalid ibn Yazid, who was favored by Ibn Bahdal, and Amr ibn Sa'id al-Ashdaq. According to historian Moshe Gil, Rawh was known to be a "very gifted" adviser of Abd al-Malik. Gil and Hawting describe his role in the caliph's administration as a precedent of the post of wazīr. Rawh is counted by some medieval sources as a sahaba (companion of the Islamic prophet Muhammad) and was known as a transmitter of hadith.

Descendants